An Interview with Professor Carl Bosma

English cleric and writer Charles Colton said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” In this high-tech culture Colton’s aphorism might be updated to “Fidelity is the sincerest form of flattery.” Running into those true believers who use, love and cannot help but spread the word about Logos Bible Software is always flattering.

Meet Carl Bosma, ordained in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, church planter, leadership developer with Christian Reformed World Missions, Professor of Biblical studies at Seminario Presbiteriano do Sul, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary, Th.D. candidate and Logos Bible Software user. In fact, Mr. Bosma wrote a very thorough and impressive manual for Libronix 3.0 that, although Logos wasn’t affiliated with, those of us who have perused it were very impressed.

I touched base with Prof. Bosma recently to get more information about this huge project:

Logos: How were you introduced to Logos Bible Software?

Prof. Bosma: I was introduced to Logos Bible Software by a student at Calvin Theological Seminary in 1991, shortly after my arrival at Calvin Theological Seminary from a church planting ministry in Brazil. The student loaded a copy onto my desktop and when I began to work with it I found the program to be very user friendly.

Logos: With your background, I am sure you are familiar with a variety of different Bible applications and software. What have you found particularly useful to you, personally and professionally, in Logos Bible Software?

Prof. Bosma: In comparison with some of the other Bible software programs, I found Logos to be very user friendly. It fit my style. Moreover, unlike some of the other programs, Libronix is a library that allows me as a preacher and teacher to add on commentaries and other theological books. Consequently, our aim at Calvin Theological Seminary is to prepare students to use this program to build their library. With their library on their laptop, graduating students do not need to rent a truck to transport a library to the church where they are called to minister.

Logos: Have you found that people who have had Logos for a while and attend your workshops are surprised at the number of features and applications that they were not using or were unaware of?

Prof. Bosma: In my workshops, I typically find that pastors who purchased Libronix and never had any training typically do not know how to use most of the resources of this excellent program.

Logos: What are some examples of applications that don’t get used and pastors are excited to discover?

Prof. Bosma: Here are some examples:

1. They are not acquainted with the note the taking feature.

2. They do not know about the resource association feature and other power tools.

3. They do not use the visual filters but once we introduce them to this feature and give them our customized filters they love it.

4. They do not know about the NET Bible or the Reverse Interlinears.

Logos: The user manual that you have created is a great resource. How much work went into creating it? And what made you decide to put that together?

Prof. Bosma: It took about 14 years to put this manual together. Once I started training students and pastors in this program, I decided to keep a record of all the examples that I used. As I was training, I had my student assistants take note. The first student assistant who began this process was Rev. Andrew Beunk. The assistant that really helped me give the manual its present format was Jonathan Luis Hack from Brazil.

I want to thank Carl for answering my questions and to thank him and the rest of you out there who are contributing so much to the Logos community.

If you have Logos software and you feel you might be missing out on some of its functionality I would encourage you to check out Carl’s manual and visit our forum—another great resource to augment your Logos experience!

Comments

Hey Jonathan, This blog post was an interview with Professor Bosma and it links to his fantastic manual. I also suggest and provide the link to the forums and when I went there and put in ‘custom toolbar’ in the search engine I got three pages of great discussion. I hope this helps!

Hey Jonathan, I was just contacted by Prof. Bosma and he said that if you contacted him he would send you the cts positioning buttons.
He also wanted to inform the rest of our blog readers that these buttons and pre-configured filters were available directly from him at cbosma@calvinseminary.edu